The Piano Lesson
by TeresaAmaliaJane
Summary: Lisbon witnesses something she shouldn't.


**This is just a little oneshot I wrote a long time ago. Hope you like it.**

She hears it softly, at first, the beginnings of a melody so soft it filters through her fatigue and gently caresses her heart. She stands in the hallway, leaning heavily against the wall, the more vivid fragments of the last case smoothly falling away like sand through her fingers as she listens. She closes her eyes and allows herself to feel; her boundaries slowly fading, every layer that she has drawn around herself, until there is no more shield to hide behind and the shadows leave her be, for once.

She finds the strength to stand on her own two feet, and she gravitates toward the source of her peace, of her calm. It comes from a room to her right; the door is half open, and she rests against the frame and at first does not believe what she's seeing. He does not play piano. It is not possible. His disturbingly large ego would not have allowed for a talent such as this to escape notice, and she wonders whether he has been hiding it for any reason she could ever understand.

And then it hits her, the memory of his eyes, so real and honest as they never were before, and his voice cracked and emotional as he trusts her with the knowledge that his wife used to play. She wonders why she has never considered the fact that she was not the only one, that perhaps he learnt a little along the way. And suddenly, she does not see him as the irritating cause of her paperwork and her headeaches; she sees the side of him that his wife must have woken up to every morning. Warm, loving, tender. Heaven must have had quite a job on their hands, tearing his wife away from something as perfect as this.

His fingers move gently over the keys, feeling, sensing, coaxing the harmonies out of his mind and into hers, a wonderful warmth that she has never felt before. The melody builds, stronger and more powerful with each note coarsing through her veins, and the room fills with bittersweet sadness as the lullaby threatens to strip them both down to nothing but their souls. A gentle rocking of the ocean, up, down, which leaves her breathless, and she knows that words could not describe the overwhelming agony she feels for him in this moment. Every memory, every tear, every drop of blood or guilt, every mocking red face that has led them on a trail to nowhere, every word, every scream.

And at last, through not murder, but music, he has released the pain in the only way he can, because no action or sentence on Earth can amount to the emotion that she feels as a single tear escapes his once so perfectly constructed mask. The notes die down and her subconscious shrieks at the thought of silence, but she knows that there is no more emotion in the world that he is yet to define. He has emptied himself of everything there is, and now he leans forward and rests his head on the surface of the piano, and his frame shudders ever so gently as the mask shatters to nothing, and he begins to cry.

She wants to comfort him, to sacrafice herself as storage for the pain so that he can be spared for a moment, just for a moment. God knows he deserves that much, after everything he has been through. But she knows that she cannot, it is not her place to do so and she doubts whether it ever will be. She runs a finger across her cheek and discovers that he is not the only one who cries, and isn't surprised at the moisture as she tenderly wipes it away. Tomorrow, she knows beyond a second thought that reality will return, that he will have pasted back together the fragments of his mask, and that she will have drawn her walls around her once more. He will paint the usual illusion that his sanity is strongly intact, and she will restrain from informing him that she herself watched it break.

But today? She softly pulls the door closed and walks away, her footsteps echoing throughout the old house, the floorboards creaking gently with each step.

Today, she has learnt what it means to listen.

**Please review!**


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